Dear Editorial Team of Nature,

From Brito et al. [1], it is clear that staying current with the literature requires considerable effort, and most researchers struggle with this challenge. I share this difficulty. Ideally, there would be a tool that not only helps researchers stay up-to-date but also makes their curation efforts visible and shareable with the community.

Such a tool exists: "bims: Biomed News", a free, non-commercial platform for literature curation. Despite its minimalist web presence, it offers a valuable service for biomedical researchers. The platform, currently based on PubMed, allows researchers to create and maintain topic-specific reports. For example, my report on “Cancer, aging and metabolism” currently serves 49 subscribers who receive weekly emails with papers I have curated on this topic.

The platform provides curators with a machine learning-enhanced interface that suggests potentially relevant papers. While I cannot speak to the technical details of the algorithm, I find that it delivers results that are both more precise and more flexible than traditional PubMed searches, making the curation process manageable even for broad, interdisciplinary topics.

By making literature curation a visible, shareable activity, platforms like bims could help address the challenge Brito et al. identify: not just finding relevant papers, but building on the expertise of colleagues who have already invested time in filtering the literature in specific domains.

With Best Regards,

Reference

[1] Brito, D., Afonso, I. & Nóbrega, C. How to find the papers you need to read — and avoid the ones you don’t. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02867-2

Kıvanç Görgülü, MD, PhD

Comprehensive Cancer Center München
TUM Universitätsklinikum
Klinikum rechts der Isar
Technische Universität München

Institute of Metabolism and Cell Death
Helmholtz Zentrum München
Neuherberg, Germany

Email: kivanc.gorgulu@tum.de
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1613-1422